Evelyn
by Bill Keeton, Murrah Class of '58

Evelyn and I were 3rd cousins. Our grandfathers were brothers. Kissing cousins as they say, but as I recall we did not do a lot of kissing.
My grandfather on my mother’s side was David Fulton Fondren. He owned and operated Fondren Grocery Store. He and my grandmother had eleven children, eight of whom lived to adulthood, so when I was growing up I had
at least a gazillion cousins. It was a huge and very close family. We all had Sunday Dinner at his house (affectionately know as The Big House) every Sunday. The usual headcount was around 40 or so counting visitors, children and pet skunks.
In the South dinner is the meal you eat at midday, supper is what’s eaten
in the evening and usually consists of cold coon and collards and a glass of buttermilk or maybe a bowl of clabber and cornbread. For you Yankees,
i.e. anyone born north of Memphis, clabber is what you get when you put
a large bowl of milk out on the back porch and let it sit for a few days. First
it sours and then later it takes on sort of a greenish color and forms curds at
which time it is pronounced clabber and is feasted upon. Now between you
and me this stuff is revolting and would gag a maggot, but obviously I can’t admit that for fear of not being looked upon as a PURE SOUTHERNER which I most certainly damn sure am!
Anyway, the point I was trying to make before it seemed necessary to
educate some of you on the finer eating habits of Southerners, is that my
side of the Fondren family were a very close group. Daddy always said
the only thing that kept them from being a clan was they didn’t know
diddley squat about moonshine. He also said you’d best not take on just
one of them unless you were willing to take on the whole bunch.
But as close as we all were, for some strange reason we had very little association with Evelyn’s side of the of the Fondren family. I don’t ever remember hearing anything derogatory about any of them so I have no
idea why that was. There weren’t any railroad tracks between our houses
so neither one of us could have been accused of living on the wrong side
of the tracks. If, in fact there had been any such tracks, you can be sure
that my side of the Fondrens would have been on the “right” side of them. Usually, when families distance themselves from each other it can be
traced back to hard feelings about a girl, a poker game, or maybe because
somebody got cheated out of winning the tobacco spitting contest. Now
that I think about it, those “other” Fondrens were Methodists and probably
didn’t even believe in predestination. I don’t exactly remember what pre- destination is, but as a Presbyterian I knew that it was very important that
I believed in it, and I certainly did, and still do for that matter. I just can’t remember what it is, that’s all.
Despite all of this Evelyn and I got to be pretty good friends. I think we
struck up a friendship at school rather than at any family picnic. I sort of
think we became fascinated with the fact that we were cousins. Coming
from a large family this was not at all unusual to find out someone you
knew was actually related to you.. Many times in my life I would meet someone, and then after getting to know them learn that we were kin to
one another (that’s Southern for each other. It seems when Yankees might possibly be reading this you have to explain everything). I also found out
for sure that Susan Sullivan and Dick Wills were cousins and one of my uncles said he thought that Billy The Kid and Jack The Ripper were also.
 Evelyn was a wonderful little girl. She was fun, always in a good mood,
and best of all she wasn’t a tattletale. When you had a tendency to be a
little bad, some would argue always bad, then non-tattling was an endear-
ing trait indeed. Evelyn was very popular, although she tended to be some- what vertically and horizontally challenged. For those of you who aren’t politically correct, and who haven’t spent much time in suave places like
Little Rock or Birmingham, you might have said she was short and fat,
sorta like a fireplug. If, however, you had gone to Mrs. Doolittle’s Charm School you certainly wouldn’t have said such a thing, but not everybody
was so fortunate. Anyway, Evelyn was good-natured about this and fre- quently joked about her weight. She later was nicknamed Skinny-less,
which even later was contracted to Skin-less, which sounded like she
didn’t have any skin which, of course, she did. As a matter of fact,
every darn one of my cousins had skin. Some more than most. When
you consider that some of our classmates had nicknames such as Granny, Philip, Goat, Toad, Brainy, Sully, and Coo then Skinless isn’t so unusual.
 With Evelyn being built the way she was she wasn’t exactly what you would call athletic. When we were in the 3rd grade Evelyn came to my house to
play one afternoon after school. We were having a pretty good time when I convinced her we could have even a better time if we climbed on top of the garage. I kept a ladder beside the garage, as I tended to spend a lot of time
up there. Where better to put on my Superman cape (a pink towel with
frayed edges held together with a diaper pin) and leap down on villains such as Lex Luther once again saving Metropolis (or was it Batman that lived in Metropolis). Or to emulate the idols of the Saturday afternoon matinees
such as Lash LaRue and Johnny Mac Brown by jumping off the balcony
of the saloon landing straddling my horse and riding off into the sunset.
You know, I never did understand how they could jump off of a building
and land straddling a horse without doing a real life version of The Nut-cracker or at least having to move up to the tenor section of the choir.
The edge of the roof was 8-10 feet off the ground and was an easy jump
for a boy 8-9 years old, although maybe not exactly in the comfort range
of an 8-9 year girl built like a fireplug. Feeling the need to show off for
my cousin, I daringly went to the edge of the roof and trying to imitate the sounds of  drums rolling and trumpets blaring, jumped to the ground with ease. Evelyn,  however, wasn’t particularly impressed and certainly did
not show the slightest inclination to follow suit. I climbed the ladder and
jumped again and then again, each time coaxing her to jump also.
After jumping the fourth or fifth time I dared her and even used the never failing double-dog dare, but she still steadfastly refused saying, “I’m not
even thinking about it and I’m not going to do it!" I quickly said “Oh yes,
you are,” as I removed the ladder.
She pleaded with me to replace the ladder, but I stubbornly refused. After about thirty minutes, when she realized there was no one to come to her rescue and after I (sweet loving cousin that I was) threatened to go into
the house leaving her all alone with darkness approaching, she finally
decided to jump. I think she was about half way down when I realized
this might not have been one of my better ideas. There just wasn’t much
about Evelyn’s jump that would have been considered graceful.
To her credit, she landed flat on both feet, but with a rather loud thud.
Within milliseconds both of her ankles sort of swole up (that’s Mississippi
for began to swell) to about the size of a prize cantaloupe at the Hinds
County Fair, and immediately began to take on the color of two huge
black eyes. She looked sort of pitiful sitting on the ground crying with
two basketball sized bluish-black ankles. I encouraged her to cry a little
more softly so as not to get us (actually me) in trouble, which for some
reason did not seem to comfort her.
I coaxed her to get up to no avail.  I tried to help her, also to no avail,
possibly due to the total ineptness of a nine year old at performing such
maneuvers, but more likely, because she for some strange reason was
not the least bit interested in my helping her. Can you imagine anyone
being this unappreciative?
I quickly surveyed the options to solve this dilemma.  I could, of course,
shoot her and put her out of her misery the way any self-respecting cowboy would have done at the Saturday afternoon matinee at the Pix Theater. But this solution presented several problems.
First of all, the only gun we had was a German Luger which was a souvenir from the war, and which had never been fired as far as I knew. Also, it would be difficult explaining to Mother just why I needed it. And secondly, I wasn’t sure what to do with her once I had “put her out of her misery”. Come to think of it, I wonder what the cowboys did with the “just been put out of their misery horses” – I don’t think they ever showed that part at the matinees.
Then there would also be the problem of her mom coming around and ask-
ing a lot of questions. “Honest, Aunt Ruby, I don’t know where she is. She climbed up this giant beanstalk that went into the sky and just sort of dis- appeared. Really, she did. Cross my heart and hope to….er, never mind”.
Boy if only 911 had been available back then. I could have just put in a
call to them and gone on home to supper. However, since the EMS system had not been invented yet, I didn’t seem to have any choice but to tell
Mother what had happened. But I must say that after telling Mother what
I had done, I was sorry I had not explored the “putting her out of her
misery” scenario a little further. Furthermore, it seemed like it would
have been easier to deal with Aunt Ruby than my Mother, who at this
point would have easily met the medical criteria for a straight jacket application followed by immediate electroshock therapy.
While I had been unsuccessful at helping Evelyn up, Mother wasn’t having much luck either. Evelyn was not able to bear even the slightest amount of weight on her ankles which by now were bigger and blacker than ever.
Mother somehow managed to get her into the house and immediately began soaking her ankles in a tub of hot Epson Salts water – a remedy they forgot
to mention in medical school – but maybe I was absent that day.
To compound the problem, we did not own a car so Mother had to find a
car she could borrow to take Evelyn home and then had to explain what
her bone-headed son had done.  Fortunately, Aunt Ruby had a son of
her own named “Tootie”, who wasn’t exactly an angel himself, which
may have made it a little bit easier for her to understand how a boy could
do such a dumb thing.
Despite this little indiscretion on my part, Evelyn and I remained friends,
but we unfortunately have lost touch over the years and are now separated
by an entire continent. I know that she has been very successful both as
a career Navy nurse and later as a tour director in San Francisco, having
established the first walking tour in that city, so I guess her ankles must
have recovered.
Writing this I realize how silly it is to have lost contact with this dear friend and relative. I think I will E-mail her and ask her to come to Atlanta for a
visit to become reacquainted. If she comes, maybe I’ll even take her up
on the roof.

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